5 reasons you need a mobile-friendly website

For as long as the Internet has been used for commercial purposes, small business marketing websites have slowly increased from a “nice to have” to a “must have” feature. But now we live in a new era. The Internet now lives in everyone’s pocket or purse. With the advent of mobile devices, the new expectation is not that your business should have a web presence, but more specifically that you must have a responsive, mobile-friendly website.

If you are late to the game in getting your website ready for the small screen, here are a few pieces of encouragement to get the ball rolling.

Mobile is where everyone’s at

According to recent research, 1.2 billion people are currently using their mobile devices to browse the web. A full 80% of all Internet users have smartphones. As younger generations finally convince their parents to let them have a smartphone, we can expect desktop usage to become more and more irrelevant for most web users. Prudence dictates that marketing dollars follow the eyeballs.

Mobile provides a seamless user interface

Because a responsive, mobile-friendly website repurposes existing code to present content in a variety of screen sizes, your marketing and branding will naturally have a consistent look and feel no matter what. This efficiency makes it easier to maintain a brand identity across multiple platforms. And also makes responsive websites less costly to build and maintain.

Desktop-only is bad for SEO

A desktop-only website doesn’t just miss out on the unique ways mobile users approach web content. In fact, since April of 2015, Google has been actively penalizing websites that are not mobile responsive. Citing the need to “adapt to [mobile] usage patterns,” Google is making it easier to find “high quality search result that are optimized for [mobile] devices” but harder for the rest.

Mobile has a universal design language

To make mobile users more at home, we can often take cues from existing mobile app design patterns. The popularity of social media apps like Instagram and Pinterest has grown. And as a result, mobile web users have gravitated toward websites that share similar visual cues. Gone are the days of presenting web users paragraphs of text and expecting them to read it. Bite-size chunks of text that grab users’ attention is the best way to maximize small screen real estate.

Mobile is a way to one-up your competition

Americans currently spend almost a quarter of their time on mobile devices, but businesses only spend 8% of their ad dollars on mobile advertising. This presents an opportunity for progressive small businesses to take advantage of mobile advertising before their competition does.

Every CCH Site Builder website is mobile responsive out of the box. If you haven’t optimized your website for mobile browsing, contact your solutions consultant to learn how CCH Site Builder can provide you a mobile-friendly website with tools and resources made specifically for accounting firms like yours.